Sleep Is Slow on the Apple iMac
To save energy and to prevent wear on your iMac's LCD screen, you can put it into a dormant state when you are not using it. This state, known as "Sleep," shuts your hard drive down and minimizes CPU activity. However, there are several ways that you can inadvertently sabotage the sleep process. By learning about the conditions and situations that are incompatible with sleep mode, you can ensure that your iMac will enter it quickly and that it will not be interrupted.
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Active Applications and Expansion Card Interference
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Before putting your iMac to sleep, turn off any active programs or pu them into a dormant state. For example, if you have songs playing in iTunes, this will delay sleep mode. Video players will also delay or prevent sleep mode because they keep the CPU running constantly. In addition, some expansion cards can delay sleep mode because they draw energy from the computer, and the Mac operating system prevents sleep from occurring in this circumstance. If you attempt to put the iMac to sleep with an active expansion card attached, the fans may become active and the display will dim. The power light will also remain on, and the hard drive will remain active.
Spotlight Indexing Service
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Your iMac features a built-in search engine known as Spotlight. The Spotlight indexing service is responsible for keeping tabs on all of your documents and other files so that you can find them quickly. If your iMac is new, this indexing service may run quite often. This will also be the case if you have recently updated its operating system, downloaded a large number of files or installed a lot of new programs. When the indexing service is searching for new files, the hard drive is activated. Therefore, it will be more difficult to put the iMac to sleep during these times. To see whether Spotlight is updating its index, click the small magnifying glass icon on the right-hand side of the menu bar. You can prevent any given folder from being indexed by making them private in Spotlight's configuration settings.
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Firewire and USB Devices
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Peripheral devices such as those powered by FireWire and USB can slow down or prevent the sleep process. When you tell your iMac to sleep, if these devices are sending data to the hard drive, they may prevent the hard drive from shutting down right away. To troubleshoot this issue, you can remove your peripherals one at a time and try to put your iMac to sleep. Wait a few seconds after you remove each device before initiating sleep mode so that the hard drive can finish processing information.
File Sharing Service
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Your iMac may not sleep if you are sharing resources with other computers or devices at the time that you press the power button or close the lid. This is because the file sharing service keeps the CPU and the hard drive active. If you do not share files with other devices frequently, you may want to turn the service off by clicking the Apple menu, "System Preferences" and then the "Sharing" entry. When the "Sharing" dialog box appears, deselect any of the items under the "Service" list that are currently selected.
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